Many publishing products, including consumer books, newspapers and magazines, are directed to two markets. In fact publishers do not only sell a product to readers but they also sell the attention of these readers to advertisers or suppliers of information. For these publishers, the growth and the sharing of the advertising budgets is critical. The competitiveness of a large part of the industry can be defined in the ability to attract advertising revenues.
Publishing products such as newspapers, magazines and books are today mainly distributed to consumers either via thousands of retail outlets or via direct sales and subscriptions. Newspapers and magazines are generally sold directly to end users or through intermediaries and the distribution process does not usually involve retail distribution. Newspapers and magazines must be distributed very quickly, within a narrow time frame, or they become worthless. Delivery time from publisher to readers must be minimal to ensure early-morning readership, to reduce losses on distribution channels and to cut down wastage by limiting the number of returned (pulped) copies. Consumer books are also subject to wastage due to the economics of printing, which entails an initial print based on an estimated demand.
One characteristic of the publishing industry is that most of the publications can be delivered in a digital form. In some cases the electronic or digital form has already supplanted the physical form (e.g., some journals and directories). In other cases, the electronic and physical form of a same publication are complementary (e.g., professional and business magazines and newspapers). In most cases, the physical form remains dominant (e.g., consumer magazines and books). In fact, with the exception of journals and directories which are generally the object of a subscription, most publishers are unable to create profitable digital products able to generate significant incomes.
In the publishing industry, the creation of value mainly is related to the printed form of the products. However, in the last few years the potential threat and opportunity represented by the electronic publishing (e-publishing) has been repeatedly examined. In fact, today, it is widely accepted that electronic publishing has a huge potential for publishers, particularly in the reduction of the distribution costs, in the opening of hitherto uneconomic geographical markets, and in the creation of new revenues via innovative products and services.
During these last years, specific technologies have been deployed within publishing companies to assess the changes in the value chain. Among these technologies, the most salient are:                Internet: this is, today, the technology the most widely deployed in the publishing industry (e.g., for content delivery).        E-commerce systems electronic commerce allows to interact online with suppliers and customers in order to take orders and receive payments.        Content management systems: they enable the reuse and adaptation of published material and the creation of different formats (e.g. HTML, PDF, XML, etc) on multiple supports such as printed copy, the Web and CD-ROMs.        Rights management systems: they enable to record the rights and licenses related to the content of publications. In view of new emerging communication media such as Internet, copyrights become more and more important and complex to manage for authors and publishers. Rights management systems may incorporate encryption methods to prevent unauthorized copies.        
The publishing industry shows a strong awareness of the potential of the e-commerce and e-business for optimizing editorial and production processes, sales and marketing, and ordering processes. Most publishers are looking for creating new products and services based on these new technologies to enhance their competitiveness.
Today, the widespread use of Internet and mobile communications offers a lot of new opportunities to publishers to combine electronic and printed media and to create “media-adaptive multimedia” products. The philosophy behind the concept of “media-adaptive multimedia” is the following: information must be conveyed to consumers in a form that can be adapted to their (multimedia) requirements. In fact, today there is a need to combine and integrate traditional printed products, digitally printed products, multimedia products, and electronic communications to satisfy the consumer requirements. Consequently, the joint usage of digital objects and printed material appears as an important issue for the publishing industry in general.
Since the competitiveness of a large part of the publishing industry depends on its ability to attract advertising and to sell additional editorial content (particularly digital content), since most publications are distributed on a printed medium, there is a need to access electronic editorial content directly from this printed medium.
However, the antagonism between owners of copyrighted works and consumers of these works has dramatically increased with the emergence of multimedia and electronic supports. Copyrighted works published on a printed media such as newspapers, books or magazines, are most of the time also available in an electronic format. In fact, with the growing use of digital information around the world, the distribution of copyrighted material represents a serious concern for publishers and authors.
Therefore, to facilitate the evolution towards “media-adaptive multimedia” in the publishing industry, there is a need to access directly from a printed document, additional information, in particular electronic information, while protecting the copyrights related to the distribution and commercialization of this additional information.